


Mourning What Never Was (and never shall be)

by Sanctuaria



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: A lil fluff, Clintasha - Freeform, Ectopic Pregnancy, Established Relationship, F/M, False Positive, Forced Sterilization, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Sexual Content, Natasha Romanov Is Not A Robot, One-Shot, Strike Team Delta, but then angst, the Red Room Sucks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-14
Updated: 2020-04-14
Packaged: 2021-02-26 17:44:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,799
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23643184
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sanctuaria/pseuds/Sanctuaria
Summary: “Natasha,” Clint whispers to her in bed that night, arms wrapped loosely around her middle and a trashcan ready and waiting on the other side, “when was your last period?”
Relationships: Clint Barton/Natasha Romanov
Comments: 20
Kudos: 56





	Mourning What Never Was (and never shall be)

**Author's Note:**

> Clintasha always was and always will be my OTP. So, I'm sorry for doing this to them.

The key jingles in the door and Natasha’s head rises from her book. It’s Clint (it’s always Clint, but she still has to be _sure_), a thin new cut across his cheek but otherwise looking no worse for wear. He has a bag of takeout in each hand, because apparently neither of them need to cook for the rest of the week. He sets them on the counter nearest the door.

“How was your mission?” she asks, memorizing her page number and setting the book aside on the coffee table.

“A deer licked me!” he says, delighted and clearly bursting to tell her the news.

“Ah, I always thought deer would one day develop a taste for human flesh,” Natasha deadpans as she rises from the couch to greet him. She can smell the blood and sweat on him as she gets closer, but from the looks of him it’s not _his_ blood, so that’s a matter that can wait for later. His arms entwine around her waist as he leans down to kiss her, the press of his lips warm, reassuring, and _alive_ to hers. (That last one she can never quite take for granted, in their line of work.)

Her breaths are coming a little harder when he finally pulls away, her fingers somehow looped around the front of his belt. “I’m gonna take a quick shower,” he tells her, “and then we can eat.”

One eyebrow raises, teasing. “Mind if I join you?”

“I don’t know…” he says slowly. “Shower’s not that big…”

A smile plays at the edge of her mouth. “Somehow I think we’ll make it work.”

He has no more complaints then—he never does—and before long they are both standing under the warm shower spray, chest to chest, mouths still linked as his hands run up her sides and down her backside, his arousal pressing into the softness of her stomach. At the last second he pulls away from her, and at first she thinks it’s for air as she’s pretty lightheaded herself, but no, he’s staring at her, pupils blown wide, with that dreamy adoration alight on his face. Clint looks at her like this sometimes, looks at her like she hung the moon when she knows all she did was not get hit by it as it sailed to its nightly path through the sky.

Once they’re finished, and once they’ve actually washed themselves as intended, Clint tells her more about his op over potstickers and lo mein, Natasha stealing bites of his fried rice and ignoring all of his attempts to swat her hands away.

“God, you always do this,” he whines with a smile. “If you want rice, _I can just get you your own rice_.”

“I want your rice,” she tells him sweetly before stealing another bite and listening to him swear.

“You are impossible,” Clint says. “_Dog Cops_?”

“If we must,” Natasha agrees, and then they are cuddled next to each other on the couch, the bright screen in front of them warding off the encroaching darkness outside the window. Somewhere in the middle of the second episode they shift until Clint is laying across her, his head pillowed on her chest and her fingers moving softly through his hair. “Bed?” she says after the third episode finishes, and Clint yawns in agreement, turning off the television while she throws out the empty takeout containers and makes sure the rest are safely stored in the fridge.

Clint wakes her up with soft morning kisses, delicate and slow and like the world outside doesn’t even exist, like they could take their time here and never have to see anything out of these four walls again. He has just risen on top of her, her red hair fanning out against the pillow, when her stomach _twists_ and she is escaping out from under him, running for the bathroom. She makes it, just barely, and empties out whatever was left of the takeout into the toilet bowl, acid burning the inside of her mouth.

“Nat?” Clint asks, dropping down beside her and bundling her hair up and out of the way with one hand. “Nat, are you okay?”

She sags against the toilet, then wretches once more, bringing up anything left to bring up and dry-heaving after that. When she thinks it’s finally over, Natasha spits some of the taste out of her mouth into the toilet and flushes it with a shaky hand, sitting back against the tile. “I…I think so. Maybe the potstickers were bad?”

“I feel fine,” Clint says, still looking concerned. He presses a hand to her forehead. “Your temperature feels normal…”

“It probably was just the takeout,” Natasha assures him, getting to her feet. She feels a bit lightheaded, and her stomach is still swirling a little, but other than that she feels okay. “Your stomach of steel protected you. I’m sure it’ll be better in a couple hours.”

Except it isn’t better, and Natasha throws up lunch too, and stays on the couch and watches Clint cook dinner, knowing that’ll come up as well if she tries to eat it. The next day is the same, Natasha managing some ginger tea and crackers in the afternoon but nothing in the morning or evening. She still doesn’t have a fever, doesn’t feel sick, and Clint shares none of her symptoms. By the third day, their Google searches are getting a bit more wild and the pinched look on Clint’s face is becoming as cemented there as the exhausted one on Natasha’s. They even briefly consider the possibility of an intestinal parasite, but she hasn’t been out of the country within the right timeframe for that.

“Nat,” Clint whispers to her in bed that night, arms wrapped loosely around her middle and a trashcan ready and waiting on the other side, “when was your last period?”

Her eyes fly open in the darkness. According to the other women of S.H.I.E.L.D., she doesn’t get periods, not really, her body just deciding to spot every once in a while with the occasional twinge of discomfort in her lower belly. But she’s seen enough movies to know what he’s asking, and she rolls over and faces him. “I can’t,” she says. “It’s not possible.” Her voice is small, barely there when she adds, “Right?”

“I’ll pick up a test in the morning.”

It is a long night, with the weight of _that_ hanging over them—one of the longest Natasha can remember, with the exception of maybe a couple in Budapest and one in Morocco last year, where Clint had gotten himself pinned for six hours under a fallen support beam. When the sun has risen and the drug store on the corner opened, Clint goes by himself while Natasha sits by the toilet in case last night’s chicken noodle soup wants to make a reappearance (it does). She brushes her teeth and kisses him anyway when he returns, his hands holding tight to her. Then she peels open the box—purple, of course Clint got the purple one—reads the instructions, and pees where she’s supposed to pee. He stands next to her the whole time, tension radiating off his body in waves. (Other people might have wanted privacy, but this is Clint and Natasha, and this is definitely not the worst thing they’ve seen each other doing.)

She can’t look at the test, can’t look at him as the two minutes stretch on longer than one hundred and twenty seconds has any right to. She fixes the image in her mind, a plastic stick with one little red line across it, because there will always be only one line, not that she’d had any occasion to take a test before. The tile of the bathroom floor is hard under her bare feet, her legs wrapped up to her chest as she stares determinedly at the porcelain.

The timer sounds, a shrill, incessant beeping, and Clint shuts it off. He picks up the test when she makes no move to, looking down at it before passing it wordlessly to her. Natasha’s hand closes around it automatically, and two red lines enter her vision. Positive.

(_Positive_. She was positive this couldn’t happen, but here they are.)

Clint squeezes her hand and she forces herself to face him. There’s hope there, hope in his eyes that he’s trying to hide, to be there for her first, always, above his own wants and needs and fears. To make sure that she’s okay.

(_Positive_.)

She allows herself to imagine for a moment—just a moment. A girl with Natasha’s red hair and Clint’s blue eyes, the blue eyes that Natasha tells him is his best feature even though she knows he thinks the same of her. Or a boy with a mop of Clint’s floppy brown hair and eyes that are wide and green and full of wonder at a world whose worst dangers he will never know.

(_Positive_.)

“How did this happen?” she utters, because most of all, that is what is going through her mind right now. The procedures and surgeries of the Red Room, the numerous medical analyses done by S.H.I.E.L.D.…

“Well, you see, when a man and a woman get together…” Clint says, and all of a sudden she’s laughing, laughing so hard she’s shaking, hands fisted in his t-shirt, right there in the bathroom.

“That’s not what I meant,” she tells him when she has mastery over herself once again.

“Guess we were wrong about not needing to use protection,” he says lightly, still holding back—still holding his feelings in check, for her. He’s right, though—they haven’t used protection in years, with her sterilization and S.H.I.E.L.D.’s near obsession with STI checks. It was unlikely enough that they had found each other already; they hadn’t wanted any more barriers between them, thin pieces of plastic or otherwise when they’d finally taken the plunge. Natasha was Clint’s, and he was hers, in every sense of the word.

“Guess we were,” she whispers. With Clint’s help, she drags herself off the bathroom floor, walking to the bedroom on legs that are unsteady for an entirely different reason than the vomiting.

“Do you…” His eyes are bright, too bright, aquamarine pools that she cannot bear to look into for too long. “Do you want to keep it?”

“We don’t even know if it is an ‘it’ yet,” Natasha tells him. Her hand finds its way to her stomach, taut and barely rounded like normal. “Please don’t get your hopes up, Clint.”

But they do, no matter how much they know they shouldn’t. Natasha drinks more ginger tea and eats more crackers and even tries keeping down some of the tasteless, scentless ration bars for the nutrients she knows they contain. The two of them spend an entire day researching obstetricians in their area because going to S.H.I.E.L.D. medical is asking for the rumor mill. Three intense background checks later, they’ve found one that meets Natasha’s stringent standards and made an appointment at the earliest possible date, two days and a hundred years away. The nausea dies down with Natasha’s new diet, just a little, and because staying in their apartment all day makes them both stir-crazy they take walks around town instead. She tenses up at the sight of a toddler with red hair in her mother’s stroller, and Clint stops for a long time outside a store with tiny onesies on the rack by the door. Already she starts considering whether it might be a Romanoff-Barton, or a Barton-Romanoff, although she does not dare voice such thoughts to Clint. Their tacit agreement not to talk about it is fragile at best anyway, when it’s so clear they’re both thinking it. His arms curls around her waist more possessively at night, his thumb stroking over her belly button in a way that almost feels like a promise.

(_“I won’t hurt you, I promise,” Natalia said, before reaching out her arms and snapping the younger girl’s neck with a quick twist of her skull._)

The day of the appointment dawns bright and early, an excitement in the air that both of them will deny to their graves, except Natasha wakes up at five a.m. with an excruciating pain in her side and shoulder, and Clint wakes up in an ever-expanding pool of blood from between her legs. He calls the ambulance, then stays by her side, fingers stroking through her hair as the siren’s wail gets nearer. She cries into her pillow from the pain of it, or maybe from the fear. Maybe this time they are one in the same, swirling up through her and circling round through the chanting in her head.

(_No distractions, Natalia… There is only the mission. There will always be a mission._)

The ride to the hospital is a blur, so much so that Natasha isn’t sure it happened, but it must’ve, as she wakes up in a pale blue hospital gown on white sheets, propped up on a mountain of pillows. The pain is gone, and Clint is by her side, holding her hand, and his eyes are red-rimmed too as the doctor walks in. “You’re not pregnant,” the woman in scrubs says, holding the stethoscope that is normally looped around her neck in both hands as she delivers the news. “I’m very sorry, Ms. Romanoff.” Natasha’s world collapses around her, the sights and sounds of the hospital and even the doctor disappearing, narrowing until all she can see is the crushed look on Clint’s face before he can hide it.

“But the test…” Clint says, his calloused hands tight around hers.

“I lost it, didn’t I?” Natasha asks.

The woman shakes her head. “It was a false positive—an ectopic pregnancy. It was never viable to start with.” She steps a little closer. “The pain and bleeding were a result of it implanting in your fallopian tube. We administered a shot of methotrexate, and your body is healing and will eventually absorb the cells.” Natasha can’t look at Clint, can’t see the pain written into every line on his face.

(_“The ceremony is necessary. For you to take your place in the world.”_)

“To be honest, it was a one in a million chance that you would ever have gotten pregnant at all, given the extensive scarring we found in your tubes during the scan.” Her voice softens. “You will never be able to have a baby. I’m very sorry.” She knows that, she does, has known it since she first found out the Red Room’s graduation procedure. Natasha’s head drops to her chest, chin pressing into her collarbone. Above her, she can hear Clint speaking further with the doctor, but Natasha can’t bring herself to care what they’re saying, can’t pull her mind together enough to focus enough to hear them.

“I’m so sorry, Natasha,” Clint tells her once the woman is gone and the curtains have swished closed behind her. She shakes her head, twisting away from him, but all Clint does is climb on the bed with her, wrapping his limbs around her while being careful of the IV and cradling her head in his hands, pressing his lips to her hairline. She can’t let him feel sorry for her, because she is the one who is broken, who has caused this, but more importantly she can’t let him be away from her either, so she presses her face into his chest and just stares unblinkingly at the tiny threads of his t-shirt, the sound of his heartbeat in her ears.

(_“I have no place in the world.”_)

It is the next morning before the hospital releases her, wanting to make sure she is not going to start hemorrhaging out of her vagina again, and Clint practically bundles her up in blankets once they get home. The constant nausea and vomiting has been replaced with listlessness, an emptiness deep inside that entirely suppresses her appetite, but she eats mechanically to save him the concern, whatever he puts in front of her. She doesn’t know what he tells Coulson to get them the unexpected time off, but he does, coming back from the bedroom to announce they don’t have to go back until they’re ready—Coulson, who must suspect about their relationship but has never been told. They are Clint and Natasha, bound together more tightly than a piece of paper from a courthouse could ever make them. If he does know, it’s against regulation, and if it’s against regulation, then the regulation will have to be changed because there is no way Fury is splitting up his best agents over a bit of bureaucratic nonsense. (As it stands, the regulations are still there, and so is STRIKE Team Delta.)

Finally, when she can stand to look up and see the pain on his face, she says it— “I’m sorry.”

“I love you,” he says at the exact same time. It’s rare that either of them voices it. As much as he babbles about dogs and arrowhead prototypes and occasionally the tragedy of _Firefly_’s cancellation on Fox, Clint knows her history with the word, and chooses to be more a man of actions. She favors saying other things, little things whispered between them that they both know the meaning of anyway, even if she doesn’t say the words.

“I love you too,” she whispers, pushing cold eggs around her plate until she can force herself to take another bite. It’s not until Clint stands up from the table and envelops her in his arms that she realizes she’s crying again. He is too, his tears dripping onto her shirt, and if she wasn’t crying before she would be now. Clint cries both more and less than she does—he’s more likely to cry after seeing a particularly cute puppy on the street, or because he’d found a baby bird with an injured wing—but he goes stoic for the big things, shuts down when things get rough like he used to when he was a kid, ducking under a table to avoid his alcoholic father’s swings or hiding in a closet and reciting animal facts to pretend he can’t hear his mother’s screams.

“You don’t have to be sorry,” he tells her. “It’s not your fault.” And she knows that, she does, it’s just—

It’s the one thing she can never give him—no, it’s the one thing they can never have, and share, together. They’ve always known it from the start, from before the start even, when she was fresh from the Red Room’s clutches and telling him about all the procedures, the programming, the conditioning. But this is different, somehow. Hope dangled in their faces before they even knew what to call it, and then torn away, leaving them wondering how they could have let themselves hope in the first place.

(She should have known better, and never let him hope at all.)

“I’m sorry,” she says instead, “that I can never give that to you. A family.”

“You’re my family,” he tells her, kissing her hair again. “I don’t—I don’t care. I never did. I told you that when we started all this, remember?”

“Yes,” she says, and her voice breaks.

“I wouldn’t trade this—you—for anything,” he promises. “Not for a kid. Not for one hundred kids.”

“One hundred kids sounds like a handful,” she chokes out.

“Yeah, and I’ve got my hands full right here.”

“I kill people, Clint,” she tells him. “I was stupid to think I could ever create instead.”

“You’re not the only one,” he reminds her. “And that has nothing to do with this. Nothing. This is the Red Room, and their twisted, fucked up ways, and…and it has _nothing_ to do with you.”

“I don’t think I would have been a very good mother,” she admits, and saying it out loud sears her somewhere deep inside.

“Nat…” He holds her face in warm hands, his expression impossibly soft. “You are amazing at literally everything you set your mind to.”

She swallows, and tries to believe him. “You would have too,” she says, because even if it will never be it’s important that he knows that. If she can’t live with her fears, he can’t live with his either, and she knows this is one of them. Turning out like his father, or Barney, or most of the father figures in his early life, who Natasha would happily go back in time and hamstring from head to toe if ever given the opportunity. “You would have been a good dad.”

She stands up from the chair, Clint rising from his kneeling position to meet her. She hugs him then, pressing her body against him. Her lips capture his, soft and insistent, and he opens for her tongue, sending an entirely new sensation tingling down her limbs. It washes away some of the grief for what never can be that has settled in her bones. Natasha walks forward and him back, guiding him toward the bedroom as her hands find their way under his shirt, brushing over the smooth, hard skin of his abs. His hands are in her hair, his breaths coming in little aborted gasps as she rocks against him, hands falling to caress the swell of her ass through her leggings.

He doesn’t blink at all when she pushes him down on the bedspread, nimble fingers working at his belt. He doesn’t blink at all when she stops, flush on top of him, and reaches over to pull a condom from the drawer of the nightstand, eyelashes thick and dark with unshed tears. He kisses her instead, softly, sweetly, and joins her in the illusion as she rolls it over him that they have any control over this, any choice at all over what does or does not get made today. She trembles above him, so he flips them over, cradling her between his forearms until she shifts deliberately against him.

The tears fall when he enters her, leaking traitorously from the corners of her eyes, but Clint kisses them away before he begins to move. He’s gentle, breathtakingly so, and even if it wasn’t doctor’s orders Natasha doesn’t have it in her to complain. His blue gaze never leaves hers until they are collapsing against each other in a tangle of limbs. It is Natasha wiping the tears from his eyes this time, as she holds him close. “We’ll be okay,” she tells him, and knows it desperately to be true.

(Because this is her place in the world.)

**Author's Note:**

> Any and all feedback is always appreciated <3


End file.
